Can confirm that I'm most definitely 55, that's why they call me Grannybrius. I still remember the good old days of playing the first iteration of A'therys Legends back in the 70s. Ah, those were the days. And no I haven't really played for around 2 years, I just check the forums here and there

Yes and the best part is that it's consistently the same invalid arguments being brought up. People speak of V1 completely blinded by nostalgia and sometimes without even having played it for an extended amount of time. The fact of the matter is that V1 and later iterations are vastly different in a lot of ways, and there are an overwhelming amount of variables, that aren't accounted for when people bring them up. One would be utterly naive to think that the previous iterations were only more successful due to the main focus being RP, which might I add wasn't even the case. Why exactly player numbers have slowly but steadily decreased since end of V1, nobody can say with complete certainty. The truth is that there are a multitude of reasons as to why, and we can only theorize about how all of these different variables might have affected each other and the general popularity of the server.
I think that you're looking at this the wrong way, and it seems to me like you haven't PvPed a lot on the server. You're being way too negative as opposed to weighing the pros and cons of it. A lot of the things you are mentioning can be tinkered with within custom plugins and mods. On top of that what cannot be changed is a result of the single thing that makes PvP unique in this game, and that is the first person point of view. Yes it makes fights more chaotic, but that also happens to be what determines who are the better PvPers, since the most organized team will win. So by all accounts it has its flaws, but all of this stems from the fact that its a niche, and you won't find many other games that fills the specific slot that A'therys does. In the end it's a matter of taste I suppose, but this is why I like it.
Had a bunch more thoughts while reading through this thread, but it's getting late, so I'd rather wait and see if anybody comes up with any interesting responses.
- Aller

I think it's about time to take a step back and look at this in a broader perspective.
As you both correctly point out, it's a matter of motivation. For the entire lifespan of A'therys, the primary motivation to PvP, besides the general enjoyment of it, has been obtaining loot from the players that you've killed. This is all good fun, but if you actually analyze it as a piece of game design, you will find it to be an incredible cheap method of motivating PvP. One could even argue that it's rather lazy, seeing as you're not actually motivating players with actual content that you're producing, but instead just leaving them to themselves. I'm not here to tell you whether it's a good or a bad system, since both have their benefits, but I will however attempt to paint a larger picture.
A'therys as a game is meant to be played extensively, meaning that it's not played in matches like a MOBA, RTS or FPS. As with all games we play them for the sake of progress. That's the motivation that keeps us playing, but the key difference is the way progress is portrayed. In said game genres your progress typically exists in the form of ranks. You play a match, lose all your items, and then move on not caring about having lost your items, because that's not a core part of your progress. It's typically here that you will find a design system similar to the one we have on A'therys. The important thing to take from this, is that this design philosophy fits well into these types of games, because their extensive progress is a separate entity from the game itself i.e. ranks, prestige etc. That's why you see them using system's similar to the one on A'therys.
On the flip side you will see that in games that are meant to be played in extensively such as RPGs, one of the main means of progress comes from items. The better an item is, the harder it is to obtain. As HeadHunter pointed out, one of their goals with Horizons is to introduced a larger variety of items to be obtained. With the old trend of very easily obtained gear, it made sense to simply have players lose their items upon death. However with this new larger variety of gear, I can definitely see how the system that HeadHunter is suggesting would leave room for more design space. The main thing to take from this though is that you're removing the currently only bit of motivation that incentivizes PvP. To make up for this you need content, and this is where the main problem arises.
By now it should be obvious that their are pros and cons to each bit of game design. Personally I am a firm believer that item diversity and keeping items on death leaves room for overall more and better game design, but it will only ever work if you have a replacement for the motivation that it removes in the form of content. If the staff is not up to the task of designing and implementing reliable content, then it's basically suicide to implement a system like that as it would just remove the only incentive people have to play the game. On the other hand if executed properly, you'll see an overall more enjoyable game with additional elements of progress which will help with player retention and general satisfaction playing the game.
To end off this post, I would like to quickly address an alternative to both systems; a hybrid if you will. I personally believe that this is a good solution as you're not risking nearly as much while satisfying both sides of the argument. Players will not lose their armour and weapons upon death, but everything else in their inventory would be lost. By making PvP be active everywhere and fast travel harder to come by, you essentially force players to transport materials around, which allows other players pray upon them. To come by the rare types of items and materials, you will have to enter a different type of zone, where players will lose everything upon death. This will create a risk-reward situation, which I personally believe would be good for the game. Players aren't forced to bring their best gear, but doing so will increase your chances of winning in battle and obtaining more valuables. By doing this you're essentially combining the best of both designs, while not relying on staff to produce nearly as much quality content to keep up motivation. On top of this you could add objectives in- and outside of the battle zones, so everybody's needs would be tended to. In short you won't risk anything that you don't want to risk, while increasing design space for future content.
I hope that this brought some light to the discussion that you were all having, as it seemed to me that you we're both talking without taking into consideration what the other persons intentions and motivations were. When it comes to general game design I think it's important to not forget to listen to what others are saying and to constantly reevaluate which systems could potential solve the larger amount of concerns. Thanks for reading.
- Aller
@Destruct @HaedHutner

Yora should be tied into your towny profile. The best way to get around this issue would be to simply run the following command to transfer all towny data from one profile to another. This should just be done by an admin so I suppose the players can just make a ticket.
/ta res <old name> rename <new name>
The real issue arises whenever a player changes his name to the same name but with different capitalised letters.

There appears to have been a bit of confusion in regards to event times at Conquest, and with good reason. The event times were not what I had stated, due to the system time on A'therys using MDT instead of EDT as I had assumed it would've since that's what the Heroes Testing Server uses. That has all been fixed now, and the event times are as seen on the illustration:

Small update on Conquest. I wanted to replace the old progress UI so that it would utilize the boss bar instead of the action bar due to Heroes 1.9 already using that for CDs. This however turned out to be possible until we update to 1.10, due to a bug in the current version of Denizen that we're using. In the mean time I'll be using a countdown in sidebar as a replacement. Seeing as I spent most of the day figuring out why the boss bar wasn't working, that'll be a project for the next few days once I have some time on my hands. As some of you know I'm currently really busy with work leaving little to no time for A'therys.

Thought that I'd give people a quick update on Conquest. As most of you probably know Full Effect Hosting has merged with PureVoltage Enterprises Inc. meaning that we're currently without a Testing Server. As a result of that, we're currently unable to do any work. With that being said, we're very close to a release. All we need is to test a couple of new mechanics and sort out the mob spawns. This is all doable in a day or two, but until we get our new testing server up and running, we have our hands tied.

It's really not as simple as you make it out to be. As a matter of fact, it's quite the opposite of what you might think. People starting to use drastic measures to get into towns that have been completely closed off, is more of a reaction to an ongoing issue, as opposed to simply being the distasteful behaviour that less informed players within the community believe it to be. Perhaps some people remember back when PvP was togglable in towns. Amongst PvPers it was, just like in this case, considered distasteful behaviour to actively raid other towns, yet have PvP toggled off in your own town. What certain towns on A'therys has decided to do here, is exactly the same thing. They're creating their own little shielded community while actively dissociating themselves from the bigger one by hiding from any sort of raid, yet doing the exact thing they're trying to prevent to others. Now you can say a lot of things about how a large portion of the A'therys PvP community are a bunch of hypocrites, but this to me is just a prime example of it. Especially considering that some of these people will be the first to complain when a remotely new player dies, and then have the boldness to go raid other new player towns on the server who aren't shielding their players from the surrounding world in one way or another.
To me it's a matter of mutual respect, and while I will admit that the players who go out of their way to get into these enclosed towns definitely also need to have their attitude adjusted; this sort of hypocritical behaviour is just fuel on the fire and only causes more of a dispute. The best advice I can give these towns is to try and open up a bit more. If they weren't doing all of this and dissociating themselves, it'd be a lot easier to have a modest conversation going. However if you choose to call a mod over at every chance in order to attempt to get people banned. You're only putting bandaid on the wounds at best.

I'm too busy IRL to feel like I’m fully committed to playing on the server and I don’t like doing things half arsed. Besides I've played on the server for quite a few years and everything that server has to offer including the community quite frankly does not feel as appealing to me as they used to. So yeah, I guess you could say that I'd rather spent what little time I have on something a little more worthwhile like friends and family.